Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and then a security guard at the Central Park of Culture and Leisure and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers, Club-81, before immigrating to the United States in 1986. He is the author, most recently, of Sentence, a collection of one-sentence stories. His other books in English are Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (winner of the 2021 Quebec Writers Federation’s Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling, and the story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know. Founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international literary programs, he is a contributor to newyorker.com, and his stories and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, Iossel has taught in universities throughout the United States and is a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.